Original post by CoriolantusFirst of all, it depends what kind of person you are and what you like. I applied to Bath, Cardiff, East Anglia, Robert Gordon's and then Edinburgh (but Edinburgh was for Pharmacology), and now I go to East Anglia. I mean you can choose based on university ranking but it does shift from year to year and honestly in pharmacy the prestige doesn't matter as much as it does in many other subjects. UEA's pretty good at supporting you, my advisor has been really good over the last three years I've been here, but everyone has different experiences. I know my friends doing English and History have found it very different, and in Pharmacy it can depend a bit on who your student advisor is but most people I know really like theirs.
UEA has a lot of societies, and I ended up picking it in the end because Norwich is quite a small city, and it's got a lot of poetry events and writing events which I like, but it also has theatre and some other fun things going on, we get quite a few people coming for concerts as well (Taylor Swift was here in the summer for the Radio 4 Big Weekend festival which was awesome). There's still a night life if that's what you like, but there's a lot of pubs if you prefer that to clubbing. If you prefer bigger cities and going clubbing more often you're probably better somewhere like Nottingham or Manchester and maybe Cardiff. Norwich has got a reputation for being 'out of the way' but honestly, it's 2 hours from London, and you can get to pretty much anywhere by going from there, or there's an airport in Norwich that flies to Amsterdam I think? Plus there's buses and stuff so it's not like you're cut off from civilisation! But I might be saying that because I'm moving to Cornwall, which is very out of the way. Plus I grew up in Aberdeen so I don't really understand why people complain about Norwich being 'so far away'.
Bath was nice when I went to visit, I have a friend now who goes there, and Bath and UEA are the only pharmacy schools that I know of at the moment that give you the chance to do your final year project abroad if you'd like to (I'm typing this from Finland :P) but I might be wrong. Bradford's the only place right now that does a 5 year course where the pre-reg is split between 4th and 5th year, which a lot of people think is really good, I guess it maybe takes the pressure off pre-reg a little bit? Other universities are trying to move towards that so I guess it's a good thing, but not if you don't want to do your pre-registration year and don't want to go into pharmacy afterwards. Cardiff is a gorgeous city, if you like rugby that is definitely the place to be, I do remember there being some rather interesting societies there, they seemed nice there when I visited although that was 4 years ago now. But because Cardiff and Bath are on the west coast the weather isn't as good as it is on the east coast. I don't know much about most of the other universities, I met a few people in first year from Manchester, and your first year grades count for a little percentage of your final grade there, which a lot of other uni's don't, which is either a good or a bad thing depending on how well you do in first year, it puts the pressure on you to work but if you're struggling to adjust to a new place it's maybe not so great? But I don't know. Nottingham's one of the top pharmacy schools, and believe me they like to tell people. I didn't want to be in a big city for 4 years, so it wasn't for me, but other people like it there, so really it depends on who you are as a person.
So I might be biased, because I don't know about the other universities, but I would say at least apply to UEA and probably Bath and Cardiff, and Nottingham as well I guess, but other people can tell you more about what the other universities are like. Good luck though, I spent ages trying to decide on where to go, but I was lucky because I'd visited the universities before, and at the end of the day when I imagined myself at uni I imagined myself at UEA, and I love it there. It hasn't all been fantastic but that was mostly due to problems outside of university and my advisor has always been really supportive of me emailing him constantly because I'm worried about something.